50 years is a long time… Practically a lifetime. Imagine spending 50 years in the same job. Nowadays, we are used to changing jobs every few years, but Kip Turner’s story will give us another perspective on the feeling of belonging and love for a job!
This 68-year-old engineer has dedicated 50 years of his life to his professional life at AT&T. What began as a job to support his family became a career of learning that has ended up leaving an incredible mark on his life.
It was 1973 when a young Turner entered the company for the first time, without even a university degree… Despite this, his curiosity and commitment led him to take on more than eight different roles in the company over the years, being able to adapt to all the technological advances that the sector demanded. An incredible story of overcoming that we are going to tell you about below.
A great lesson, but does he regret it?
Turner is proud of his time on Earth and his career, but Turner has always had a thorn in his side, and that is not having taken advantage of the educational opportunities offered to him by the company. Although he took more than 150 technical courses to train himself and continue to contribute the best version of himself, his dream was always to obtain a degree in Engineering (and he could have achieved it thanks to AT&T’s reimbursement programs).
The protagonist of this story nodded when he said that if he could go back in time, he would not hesitate for a second to take advantage of each of those opportunities to train himself.
What is corporate education?
These are programs offered within companies so that workers can continue to train themselves continuously. They are not mandatory programs but they are ways to train workers for their future work. In this case, the company AT&T offers up to $30,000 in tuition reimbursement for workers who graduate from the program.
Almost 50% of companies in the United States provide some type of educational support according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and the incredible work that this is rarely valued, allowing your workers to continue training despite being working.
Learning = success
Turner never went back to university but he accumulated knowledge within the company. He proudly claims that everything he learned during those 50 years of work was by putting his hands directly on the equipment. Turner’s feat is even more incredible if we look at it in perspective. Think for a moment that 50 years ago the technology was very different from what we know today, and that this man has gone through several generational changes within the company, and he hasn’t needed a university degree! Perhaps because not everything is based on having a degree, but on the desire you put into learning, because practice and knowledge are as valid as any educational degree.
What Turner has shown by his example is that clearly, if you want, you can. This man stayed on top of his game thanks to his ability to adapt and learn a new experience every day.
Kip Turner shows us how success is not only about work, it is not only economic, but that the key to success is, for each person, different. His dedication and loyalty have shown that his success was based on that, on becoming better every day and being able to live that feeling of belonging to a place that is giving you everything so that you can continue to train yourself.
For the new generations, Turner’s message is key: there is always space and time to learn, no matter what stage of your career you are in, as the elders say, knowledge does not take up space! His regret also reminds us that we must take advantage of all the tools that are presented to us along the way that can help us grow professionally, and that we must never leave our passion for something aside because there must always be room for everything. Every day is a new opportunity to learn and every step you take brings you closer to your destination, remember that!